Ella Baker and the challenge of black rule
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Ella Baker and the challenge of black rule Lester K. Spence Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. [email protected]
Abstract What is African American Politics? What form should it take? How does it conceptualize white supremacy? In In the Shadow of Du Bois, Robert Gooding-Williams uses the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Fredrick Douglass to provide answers to these questions. While the choices of Douglass and Du Bois make a great deal of sense, they reproduce the tendency of confining political theory to literature – a move that bounds the genre in problematic ways. In this article, I in effect attempt to ‘‘unbound’’ the genre by considering Ella Baker, a civil rights era political organizer. Contemporary Political Theory (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00448-8 Keywords: black political thought; praxis; leadership; gender and politics; black politics
civil
rights
movement;
black
How should African Americans contest white supremacy? This question is one of the core questions animating Afro-modern political philosophy. For Robert Gooding-Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois and his magisterial work The Souls of Black Folk, responding to the nascent Jim Crow regime, provides answers that structure Afro-modern thought. Gooding-Williams, seeking to trouble those answers, turns to Frederick Douglass. In many respects this choice is a natural one as Souls era Du Bois recognizes himself as Douglass’ heir. In this work, I want to juxtapose another figure against Du Bois – Ella Baker, one of the most important figures of the US civil rights movement. Like Du Bois, Baker’s work represents a powerful response to Jim Crow. With exceptions (and unlike Du Bois) Baker did not express her ideas in essays, academic monographs, or novels but rather through institutional action. Here, I read Baker into Afro-modern political philosophy in order to argue for praxis as a sub-genre, one that offers us the opportunity to glean political theoretical responses from actors like Baker, to expand the breadth of political philosophy as a whole, and to think through pressing contemporary problems. Afromodern political thought is a genre of thought found in written text, spoken word, art, and political action/organizing. Thinking of Afro-modern thought otherwise reduces the breadth and depth of the genre in critical ways.
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Spence
I begin by briefly examining Afro-modern thought1 as a genre of political theory. I then turn to Gooding-Williams’ reconstruction of Souls (and Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom). For Gooding-Williams, Souls offers questions and answers that continue to animate the genre while Douglass helps to critically interrogate Du Bois’ answers. I then suggest that given the genre’s preoccupation with studying white supremacy and combatting it, focusing solely on Afro-modern thought produced in text (usually but not solely by elite writers) narrows the scope of the genre
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